Published in 1934.

Written by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author, Leland Stowe. He visited Germany shortly after Hitler came to power. His reports on the militarization  of Germany and the threat it posed to the world were not published by his employer, the New York Herald Tribune. As a result, he published  this book, but it sold very few copies. Few people wanted to believe  the seriousness of the situation and thought he was an alarmist. Only later was Stowe praised for his warnings about Nazi Germany.

TWO VOICES-ONE MAN

On October 18, four days after he had led the Third Reich out of the League of Nations and the disarmament conference, Chancellor Adolf Hitler made the following peace declaration before eight hundred of his party leaders in Berlin.

"Germany wants nothing but peace," said Chancellor Hitler. Then he added: "More than anybody else National Socialist Germany clings to peace because the National Socialist idea is based on a racial concept of state leaders united by blood. It turns toward domestic issues and therefore knows no imperialistic policy of conquest toward the outside. We reject every policy of force but we are just as much determined to guard our rights."

Four days earlier, while the Reich's Geneva bombshell was still reverberating in world capitals, Adolf Hitler spoke to foreign governments and to universal public opinion in equally impressive language. In his personal manifesto, issued on that memorable October 14, the Nazi dictator summed up the attitude of Germany in these words: "The Government and the people reject violence as an unsuitable means to remove existing differences with the European community of states."

That same night Adolf Hitler made one of the greatest and most stirring speeches of his career. At least forty million of his compatriots listened by radio to his tempestuously earnest voice. Untold millions heard his words rebroadcast in five languages, virtually to all corners of the earth. Among other things, speaking of France, Hitler stated:

"I speak in the name of the entire German people when I solemnly declare that we all are imbued with the sincere desire to wipe out an enmity that, in regard to its sacrifices, is out of all proportion to any possible gain. . . . It would be an immense event for all humanity if these two peoples banished violence once for all from their common life. The German people is ready to do so."

These ringing phrases put fateful questions to the rest of humanity, as they put them today with disturbing insistence to the foreign correspondent within the boundaries of the Third Reich.

Is the National Socialist German government--in its actions as in its words--turned toward what makes for peace? Is the National Socialist regime ready to banish resort to violence from its doctrines and its practices? Does Nazi Germany mean eventual peace or eventual war? After two months of closest observation and research in Germany, this correspondent is prepared to report what he has seen and learned. Until now the cyclonic pace of the Nazi revolution has stirred up a mystifying whirlwind of dust. There has been no time for correspondents in Berlin, caught up with the mad rush of front-page news every day, to sift more than a few fundamental facts from the chaff; neither to catalogue them nor to analyze what they may signify in full. Nor is it possible as yet to do this regarding all phases of Germany in the remaking. But Chancellor Hitler has challenged the world to accept the National Socialist government's expressed desire for peace.

It is not my purpose simply to rechallenge the peace challenge of Adolf Hitler. It is my purpose to present those facts, based upon a personal inquiry of two months, which seem most pertinent to the all-important question posed by the Reich's Chancellor when he says, "Germany wants nothing but peace." But before we proceed to the Germany whichI have seen, one distinction has been imposed by circumstances and the record-one might almost say by Chancellor Hitler himself. For the voice of Hitler on October 14 and October 18 was not his only voice, nor was it the voice which millions of Germans know best.

Adolf Hitler has two voices, and there are two tongues spoken by the National Socialist leaders of the Reich. One language has been addressed, in growing volume, for fourteen years, to the great masses of discontented German citizens. You cannot judge National Socialist Germany by one voice alone. You must listen to both and study both if you are to arrive at any approximation of the truth.

What is this other Nazi voice? It can be found in no higher an authority than in Adolf Hitler himself. In his book, Mein Kampf (My Battle), Hitler has poured out his entire philosophy of internal regeneration and social revolution and his most varied conceptions of what the bases of Germany's foreign policy must be. This book, in its original and unexpurgated German edition, is 781 pages in length (contrasting sharply with the some 300 pages in a recent English translation) and has been printed in more than one million copies.

In the German edition of Mein Kampf, which graces every books hop window in the Reich and is being read by millions of Germans, Chancellor Hitler makes such comments as these about peace and war.

"It is necessary, then, for better or worse, to resort to war if one wishes seriously to arrive at pacifism. In reality the humanitarian and pacifist idea will perhaps be excellent on that day when the man superior to all others will have conquered and subjugated the world first of all in such a measure that he becomes the sole master of this earth. First, then, the battle, and afterward-perhaps-pacifism" (page 315).

"The question of recuperation of German power is not how can we manufacture arms. Rather it is, how can we create the spirit which renders a people capable of carrying arms? When this spirit dominates a people, will power finds a thousand ways, each of which leads to a weapon" (page 365).

"France is and always will be the deadly enemy of Germany" (page 699).

"To forge a well-sharpened sword is the object of a people's domestic policy; to see that the forging is done and to seek allies at arms is the
object of its foreign policy" (page 689).

"An alliance which is not concluded with a view to war is absurd and worthless" (page 749).

"Not until the Germans have realized that they must engage in an active and final conflict with France will it be possible to bring the fruitless struggle to a conclusion-on condition, however, that Germany sees in the extermination of France a means of providing her people with the necessary room for expansion. . . . There are eighty million Germans in Europe today. This policy will be recognized as the correct one when in less than one hundred years from now the continent of Europe is inhabited by 250,000,000 Germans" (page 766).

"Woe betide the National Socialist movement if (in its foreign policy) it relies on protests, instead of preparing to fight" (page 712).

Does National Socialist Germany want "nothing but peace"?

Or is National Socialist Germany "preparing to fight"?

Which voice and which doctrine is a perplexed and anxious world to accept as true and final words, alas, are too obscure and too contradictory. One must go to Germany and seek for oneself.

If actions are more eloquent than words, then Germany today is the most eloquent nation in Europe. Here action, and all kinds of actions, abound.